Anchors Who Aren’t Selling It & Other Observations from the Road

I’m on the road in Rhode Island. Actually, I’m siting in a conference in Newport and had a couple of minutes in between sessions so I thought I’d hit the keyboard for some observations.

Maybe it’s just me but it seems like there are some prompter related issues with the good folks at The Weather Channel. I don’t know if it’s because the on-air folks just haven’t had a chance to pre-read their copy, the prompter is too far for them to see it or they just can’t read the words on the prompter. Whatever the problem is, they aren’t selling it. Sometimes it seems they get to the end of what appears to be a sentence and then they add a word that suddenly seems to have cropped up. It’s like they really aren’t sure what is going on. And it appears to be getting worse since more “news” is involved in the weather. Perhaps it’s just me. Has anyone else noticed this?

I caught the local news this morning as I was getting ready for my day and again, maybe it’s just me but the morning news crew on this particular station didn’t strike me as overly professional. My first reaction to the weather girl was that her black fingernail polish was a litle on the goth side. Again, maybe that is cutting edge here in this particular part of this part of New England. Actually my wife noticed the black nails before I did. What caught my attention was the fact that they were recycling old news to fill air-time. Granted, newspapers have been doing this for years but I had not seen TV stations re-visiting old stories from 20-years ago. The piece I saw this morning appeared to be an old news package from 20-years back. An interesting concept. Is this something that others have seen or are currently doing on the air? It’s a great way to fill air-time if you are short on reporters. I would think it might work better if someone re-cut the pieces so there is a short anchor/reporter pkg or a VO covering multiple stories that ran about a minute. Of course it is so much easier to re-cue an old package and that fills time so much better!

7 Comments on “Anchors Who Aren’t Selling It & Other Observations from the Road”

A lot of stations are dusting off old packages to fill time. In fact, the morning program at WBBJ a while back was airing old packs. WNEP in Scranton, PA does it all the time. I guess the old saying “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you” should be changed to “If you haven’t seen it, it’s NEWS to you”!

TWC’s morning show is pretty much unwatchable IMHO. I think Al is a great guy, and Stephanie Abrams is affable and friendly. But, with all the news in the morning weather, and all the “we’re VERY happy to be awake with YOU today”, it’s just a bit much.

Austen,
Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you for psoting your observation on the TWC morning show with Al and Stephanie. I tried to watch one morning and my first reaction was: S-A is trying waaaayyyy too hard to show us how much fun she is having and how happy she was to be there. I first thought she needed to take something to bring her down and then I just turned it off so she wouldn’t bring ME down. The main reason I watched TWC in the past was for …….wait for it…THE WEATHER. Now, I csn’t even seem to get that from a channel that is supposed to be about the weather.
Again, thanks for checking in and give my regards to the family.
Regards.

Since we canceled television on January 1st of this year, (best thing we ever did – BTW) I can’t speak from personal viewing, but even before the GE/NBC takeover of TWC, it was headed into the drain. I can only imagine what it’s like now.

When I used to do the morning show, people would ask me “How can you look like you’re having so much fun at 5 AM??? I answered, quiet honestly after getting up at 2:30 AM to go to work, ” Number 1, I’m naturally a happy person! Number 2, at that hour, sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying!” Later in my career, I actually preferred the morning shift to the nighttime shift, but the secret was to accept that schedule and adjust your body clock to it, instead of trying to cat nap here and there to make it “bearable” in a “regular” lifestyle timetable.

My station has been running old stories for years under the “Flashback” banner, but we don’t do full packages. It’s more of a “This Day in History” segment that pulls from our archives. It was always well-received, but now I don’t have time to do it anymore…